Monday, July 12, 2010

Progress with Gregory and other projects

Well, I've finished compressing the vocabulary list into discrete forms and their frequencies. There are about 6575 forms in the 5 Orations. This is not exact, as there are a few forms I have kept discrete where I might have collapsed them, simply to aid my own processing of them.

The next step will be to do some morphological tagging, so I can (a) process words by frequency of word rather than form, (b) know what to put for vocabulary references. This I expect will take a bit longer than the initial processing will take.

One of the obstacles for me in this, and in other Greek-language projects, is simply that most of my tools for working with Greek are on the laptop that spends most of its time at college, which means weeknights are not good times for Greek work; most of my Greek-related non-digital tools also live at college. But conversely I don't want to spend college time sidetracked into masses of Greek-work. Anyway, I will find some workarounds and keep at it.

I sent off an email to ask about the copyright issues on a Greek-translation of Oerberg, but no response at yet. I'll finish up the first chapter and leave it at that for now. Already one sees the issues of translation versus a ground-up approach, in that Oerberg's first chapter covers some key words in the 1st and 2nd declension across the genders: insula, oppidum, fluvius, whereas the Greek translation is immediately introducing νῆσος, πόλις, and ποταμός, of which only the latter would normally have even a chance of getting into an opening chapter!

I'm thinking sunday afternoons will make a good time for podcast recordings. I'll try and work through a single text at a time and produce some fair audio for them. Hopefully I can get started this week with Puer Romanus or A Greek Boy at Home.

See my last post for an attempt to locate more Direct-Method texts from the turn of the previous century. Not all make workable material, but some are really helpful.

I'm becoming quite convinced that we need something in the vein of Piper Salve meets Traupman's Conversational Latin, but for Greek. The former is an excellent little volume that came out of Latin conventicula in Europe, while the latter has a veritable cornucopia of communicative Latin. Something by topic-area, with key phrases and words, and some continuous dialogue as well.

PS: having made some progress on the Gregory project, it strikes me that I'm not far short of morphologically tagging the whole text. Surely this could be of wider use than the Reader? If I knew what format to put this information in for broader use, I'd be happy to make it more available towards the end. (It's quite slow going though!)